On 23/10/2011 22:53, Chris Pawley wrote:
That's possibly a bit misleading, because the biggest landowners in terms of
acreage are obviously going to be farmers and the state. A more useful
comparison would be land ownership by value.
I think you confusing 'agricultural landowner' with 'farmer'. The
former tend to be aristocratic estates who rent their land to the
latter tenant farmer. Unfortunately the table isn't misleading, as it
illustrates the reality I was pointing to; that the majority of land
is owned by the few.
It is stil the case, though, that land value is far more important than
land acreage. And, in terms of value, while I don't have any access to
the actual figures, my guess is that the biggest value holders are
institutional investors such as pension funds and the like.
The problem with land is that it is, by nature, unequal, and the uses to
which it is put require unequal amounts. It isn't directly relevant
whether agricultural land is owned by lots of individual farmers or by a
few large landowers who rent it out to tenants (and a lot of individual
farmers themselves prefer the latter, anyway), it's still going to be
the case that most land is owned by farming-related organisations or
people. Even so, it's worth noting that tenant farming has declined
significatly in the UK in the past 50 years or so, with only around 35%
of agricultural land being let on a traditional tenanted basis in 1994[1].
I find it rather hard, therefore, to get worked up about inequalities in
agricultural land ownership. What matters more to me is ownership of
commercial, industrial and residential land - something which has a
direct effect on the lives of far more people than who owns the farms in
the countryside.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenant_farmer#England_and_Wales
Mark
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